Master’s Completed!

On August 12 I presented my practicum / thesis to my anthropology department on the Fedora Project titled: An Exploration of the Fedora Project’s Online Open Source Development Community.

The unique part of my project was that I used virtual methods for almost the entirety of my research. The methods entailed the following:

Participant Observation In Person / Online

In Person

FUDCon Toronto

Online

Blogs / Fedora Planet

Twitter

IRC

Email / Mailing Lists

Qualitative Research

In-depth Semi-Structured Interviews based on data gathered during participant observation

Conducted via Email and IRC

Quantitative Research

Online Survey based on analysis of the Qualitative Data

Conducted using LimeSurvey

Based on the data gathered during this research I was able to structure my findings into five themes.

Getting Started

Turnover

Collaboration

Motivation

Community

In the final report each of these themes had key points that surfaced to support them and recommendations that were made based on analysis of the data gathered throughout the entire research project. You can find the community version of this report here. If you would like the full thesis / practicum paper (a bit more academic than the community report), please email me: diana [@] cyber-anthro.com. If you would like me to give the presentation again, just let me know. I am more than happy to share this data with anyone in the Fedora / FLOSS / Anthropology or Academic communities.

My committee was very pleased with my work and the results of my research, which culminated in the previously mentioned final report and presentation. With that, they signed off on the last of my graduation requirements and on August 13th I graduated with my Master of Science in Applied Anthropology!

Virtual Methods Report

I am hoping to find time in the coming months to write up a report on how I approached my research from a virtual methods perspective and did everything virtually from taking down and organizing field notes to daily interactions within the community. Not to mention the trials and tribulations of doing a study like this and lessons learned for those who wish to embark on a similar path. If you think you’d find this useful, please email me and nudge me to get it done!

Onward to PhD!

Last year I applied and was accepted into the Interdisciplinary Information Science PhD (IIS PhD) program at UNT where I started this fall. I will be focusing my studies on Human Computer Interaction and Information Policy. Due to my academic record I was nominated for and subsequently awarded a fellowship that covers my full tuition for the next four years. I can’t tell you how excited I am to be continuing on with my PhD studies, daunting though they may seem right now!

While my PhD is not in anthropology, the program is heavily centered around research, which is where my anthropology background will be a huge benefit. I will be utilizing all of my anthropologist skills in each of my research projects and final dissertation. Being interdisciplinary, I am able to blend all of my previous education as well as my skills in information architecture, usability, interaction design, and user experience together into a combined subject of study.

I am very excited to start down this new path and my goal is to aim my studies on the same subjects I did for my undergraduate and masters degrees. Those being, gaming, social networking, blogging, online communities, and open source. My hope is to also extend this into the realms of the digital divide, digital property rights, net neutrality, information accessibility, and more!

Thank you Fedora & Red Hat

Thank you to each and every single one of you who worked with me on my Fedora research. Every single one of you made a difference and I hope we get the chance to work with each other again!

I’m Looking for just 20 more people to give me 10 minutes of their time to contribute their thoughts to the survey. Please pass this on to anyone that you know is a contributor. I am looking to wrap this up by Friday, so all of your help in spreading the word is much appreciated!

P.S.If you are not a Fedora contributor, please do not take the survey.

Survey Now Available:
I am hereby inviting all Fedora contributors to participate in my Fedora Research Survey by clicking on the banner below!

If you are not a Fedora contributor, please do not take the survey.

Survey Details:
All responses are anonymous, so please answer as honestly and thoroughly as you can! Only caveat is that you MUST be 18 years old or older to participate. It should only take 10 to 20 minutes to complete, unless you feel you have a lot to add to the open text areas, which from a researchers perspective, the more data the better!

Spread The Word!
Please repost this in your blogs or anywhere else you see fit!

Feel free to use the code below to incorporate the banner shown above:<a href="http://cyberanthro.limequery.com/44899/lang-en" target="new"><img src="http://www.cyber-anthro.com/images/surveyresearchbanner.png"></a>

First Time Hearing Of This Research?
You can learn more about my research by viewing my introduction post to it here and the research FAQ I created here.

As always, if you have questions feel free to comment or contact me diana [@] cyber-anthro.com!

Go Fedora!
And of course a preemptive congrats to all your hard work on Fedora 13, only 8 days away!

So, in my last post I talked about coding and no I don’t mean coding as in scripting or writing programming code (though it is just as tedious), I’m talking about coding qualitative data.

For those non-anthropologist among my readers, what this amounts to is tagging subsections out of large amounts of textual data with a taxonomy you develop along the way. This taxonomy is based on the themes that emerge as you sift through all of the data. This, if done meticulously (as of course it is), can take quite a bit of time and requires a bit of resifting of the data to capture and tag everything correctly.

Speaking as not only an anthropologist, but also an information architect, I actually really like this part! It’s to anthropology what sifting through the dirt at a dig is to an archaeologist. Each time something unique emerges from the sand/data there is a little *squee* that occurs. Each bit is just as precious as the last no matter how big or small. We collect each and every one of these unique themes and catalog them for reference later.

What happens after all the sifting has been completed is actually very interesting for dataphiles like me. You can then select any tag you used and see all of the text among all of your data sources that matches that tag. Or, you can line up all your tags as see which tags show up most often. Consider doing that to your blog, or Delicious Bookmarks.

You can tell a lot about an avid Delicious user, or at least what interests them on the web, by looking at their tags as a whole and then at their most (and even least) used ones.

Tagging data and looking at the results of that process is very similar.

Basically, it is in a sense both organizing your qualitative data and quantifying it. As you can imagine, it’s very revealing!

How else do you quantify qualitative data? Well you make a survey of course! Why would you do that? Well it helps triangulate your data. In other words, it helps you generalize your qualitative findings against a broader sample in quantifiable terms.

In order to do this properly we take those themes that emerged through our coding or tagging process then use that data to form appropriate questions and answers to be asked of the same audience but on a larger scale. Thus, we use both qualitative and quantitative methods in the research process giving it both depth and validity.

Could you do one without the other? Well, of course you can and many anthropologists tend to prefer one over the other. I’ll not step into the qual vs quant debate here, except to say that it exists. What I will say is that the goal of the anthropologist is to approach research and the research questions from a holistic perspective. Using both methods, as I am doing here, helps to do this.

Why am I going into all of this detail? Well, if you’ve reached this point you are in for a special announcement! My survey has been approved by my committee and is now in the hands of the IRB for review. Once they approve it, I’ll be releasing it to all Fedora contributors to participate in.

It is about 28 questions (depending on how you answer) and will take most people less than 10 minutes to fill out. I say most, because I do give you places for long text descriptions if you so desire, so those people who have a lot to contribute may take a little longer. From my perspective, the more data the better!

I have lofty hopes of getting about 100 of you excited enough to participate. So, once I release it, I will need the help of all of the Fedora contributors that read this to pass it along and to tell those people you pass it along to, to pass it along as well!

An interesting side note to the survey is that it was created with the free and open source LimeSurvey! So, by taking it you’re not only helping Fedora, but you’re also supporting a pretty cool FLOSS project!

During the process of creating the survey I’ve become quite the LimeSurvey user. So, if anyone needs help with it, please feel free to ping me. When I’m done with this project I may even find a way to lend some of my user interface design and usability skills to the LimeSurvey project, if they want them. I have a few ideas that could make it a bit easier to use after having been a user myself.

I honestly cannot wait to get the survey out and start getting the data back. This part of the process is always so exciting!

Tweetz

#Research this week reinforced this. Everyone has a hack. Embrace the hacks and figure out how to incorporate them into your product. #ux5 days ago